The New York Times Book Review is considered by many to be the gold standard in book reviews (to quote a nameless author we interviewed: "You only know you made it when you're inside there"). And reaching over 1.7 million people every week, The New York Times Book Review is not only the most high-profile, but also the most read book review publication in the country. The Knight News recently spent a day in their office and spoke with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor-in-chief.
Michael Orbach: Okay, first question: How does the New York Times Book Review work? How do books get chosen? How do reviewers get chosen?
Sam Tanenhaus: Gallies and advance reading copies come in every day. Every week, the three of us: Bob Harris, the deputy [editor]; Dwight Garner the senior editor and I distribute them among the preview editors. Each of us may hold on to some. Dwight does a lot of fiction and all the poetry books; Bob does adventure books and I'll look at some histories, sometimes fiction and a range of things that happens to interest me. But the rest are distributed to the five preview editors. They spend time with the books and a couple of weeks later will report back individually [and] meet with the three of us. They decide what books we'll review.
That's something people don't understand when they wonder why there is more fiction, why isn't more fiction, why are there are more serious books, why there aren't more serious books; that has nothing to do with me, really. I decide what goes on the cover, how long a piece we might do, but as far as selection of books go, that is really made by the preview editors. Then, in that meeting where they tell us what books should be reviewed, they'll also propose names of reviewers and we may have a conversation and have other ideas. That will also depend on the length of the review we want, although sometimes that will also be dictated by the byline; if you're asking John Updike to review a book you're going to give him as much space as he thinks he needs. That's an extreme example. But often we will adjust the assignment to particular reviewers. Some excellent reviewers are happy to write short; some need more space and in a particular case where we think we have a really unusual match-up or exceptional contributor, someone we think doesn't often appear in our pages, that we've been following, we'll try to give him more room.
That's how we decide, and the previewers themselves are evaluating each book individually, but in the context of their sometimes alarmingly complete knowledge of what else there is. If a writer is not bringing something new to the conversation or is not very well-established with a following, long-awaited book, or has really superb narrative or analytical skills, there's a good chance the book won't get reviewed. The same applies with variations to every book we do. There are a lot of books on Darwin and religion; we can't review everyone. There are many first novels; we can't review them all. For a first novel to be reviewed it has to seem strikingly good; that's always been the case and that always will be. It's unfortunate, but that's how we do it.
MO: I know this question is always brought up: Why is more non-fiction covered in the book review than fiction? I know you've answered that there's simply more non-fiction than fiction…
ST: Yes, that's one reason. Another is that if you look at a publication like the New York Review of Books, or the New Republic, or the New Yorker, those are the publications that we probably look at mostly, mistakenly perhaps, you'll see most of them overwhelmingly are covering non-fiction because there's more of it published. We're also not only in the business of reviewing books, but presenting what we hope will be interesting journalism to readers. It is easier to get a good piece of analysis and writing, a better essay, a better report, whatever you think a book review of being, on non-fiction than fiction. Novels and short stories are very hard to write about. There are few really strong fiction reviewers around and their standards are very high. Because what happens is, even though many of the reviews we run are mixed, and very few are raves, probably more pans than raves, almost every book we send out, we think is pretty good. We send a novel or a short story [collection] out to a critic because we think it's good and yet the review will often be harsh.
Why is that? Because the critics read them even more critically than we do. If you give a book to a great critic like James Wood or Tony Scott, they see into the machinery of a book, they see all the other novels that it sounds a little bit like, all the influences. What happens is if you send out a lot of mediocre fiction, what you're going to end up doing is publishing a lot of harshly negative reviews of authors no one's ever heard of, and it doesn't seem fair to have a first-time novelist who will get slammed in the pages of the Book Review. We don't really see the purpose of that.
MO: On that some note and moving towards a damning question, what constitutes original fiction? I know there's no real answer to this question. I was reading Rachel Donadio's essay on African fiction in the New York Times Magazine - is there a place where you can label the new growth for fiction?
ST: That's a good question. We're going to look into that ourselves; we are doing a spring issue on translation, global fiction, and that's what we're going to try to see. Now, if you look closely at Rachel's piece, she has some pretty clear ideas of where South African fiction is now and you should ask her about that. [Editor's Note: We did, look at the sidebar.] Where is the interesting fiction coming from? I think something that really interests me is this: ne reason we're using this word 'global,' not to sound like Larry Summers or Bill Clinton, [is] you have this wave of people who are not native-born Americans or Brits, who are revitalizing English; or maybe they've grown up or lived here but they've got whole different cultural knowledge. Like Kiran Desai. It's interesting to see how they revitalize the language.
A writer like Houellebecq is hugely influential, I mean, I like him; I'm not crazy about him, but you talk to Europeans and they say he's the first major novelist in a generation. It's hard to know because so many of the old categories are breaking down, the Brits-the Martin Amis-Julian Barnes generation all want to sound like Bellow, and a lot of the American writers look to the Latin American writers for influence-- you're still seeing the magical realism. And then you have just very good realist novelists. Richard Ford is really good, Claire Messud is really good. So there doesn't seem to be this uniformity that there once was-a movement, writers of a certain type that were connected to each other. So it's hard to answer that question. In the course of a year how many really first great novels do we see? Probably not that many, it's a form that isn't at a peak moment right now.
MO: Conversely then, are we seeing a rise in better non-fiction?
ST: I think we're seeing a lot more non-fiction. A lot more serious and seriously gifted writers turn to non-fiction than they once did before because of the narrative possibilities. The novel moves a little away from narrative and it really has for a long time. But there seem [to be] more possibilities for non-fiction writers, especially in a time of global crisis. There are big stories to tell that would be hard to tell in fiction; they could be told brilliantly in fiction, but it is hard to tell. A really good writer like Amis now is writing a lot of historical fiction, Roth, Updike-these are pretty big writers to do historical fiction which used to be an inferior genre. It's because they want to be relevant for one thing and I don't think they're afraid to say that and they're finding that's where the excitement is. There's the odd new novel by Dave Eggers which is very ambitious, it takes a real-life story and turns it into a novel, and it's someone else's voice speaking through him. You can take all these techniques and apply them to non-fiction. Norman Mailer is probably one of the first of the really great modern writers who wrote a lot of non-fiction. I was looking at his anthology, In The Time of Our Time, and he says [about writing non-fiction] it always seemed like fiction to him no matter what he does because you're bringing the attitude of the novelist, [and] you're shaping the experience that you're writing about. I think in an odd way those novelists who worked in non-fiction opened up the possibilities for non-fiction writers who were really pursuing it. It's easier to find readers too.
MO: How do you define a good review? I know I have this problem talking to my writers. Is it one that argues an aesthetic point like Jonathan Franzen did when he wrote about Alice Monroe?
ST: Well, the easy answer that is not very helpful is that you have a very good writer. But there are different ways to do [reviews]. It's interesting to compare, say our two most consistently featured reviewers of major fictions, Liesl Schillinger and Walter Kirn. Walter writes out of his own sensibilities and he doesn't quote a lot from the novels he writes about. He doesn't give you a lot of details about the book, but he captures the mood or sensation of the book. If you look at his review of Jonathan Foer's novel or of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men he recreates the atmosphere of a book in his very own powerful persuasive prose. Liesl tries to recreate the world that the novel itself describes. We have her on Martin Amis and she's read a lot of Dostoyevsky; she knows Russian; she's read a lot of the background; she's putting Amis in the context of all this other writing and trying to figure out what he does.
The two of them are both great prose writers, that's the key. You never feel that they're dutifully recounting what's in a book - that's what no one wants to read, a book report where you name all the characters and then you work through the plot changes. That's what Leon Weiseltier calls "writer's workshop" writing - the first part of the novel works, then it breaks down in the second part, it gets a little better in the third. All that may be true, but our suspicion is that a reader is not that interested in it. It's a difficult thing for a reader to have to get through. Instead, if the writer has the power to absorb what's in a book and recreate the experience in their own words, which you have to be a really good writer for, that's what we like. I like quotations too, so you can see what a writer occasionally writes like.
But it's this kind of absorption of a book and telling it in your own narrative. A good review, a good argument, a good essay to me is always narrative. Not in the sense, that it has to be chronological, but it builds for some kind of climax or there's a kind of sustaining of intellectual suspense; you're being taken somewhere by the writer. It must be a recreation of the experience. That's what the good reviewers do and very few reviewers are doing it.
MO: Culturally and politically, where do you see the role of the New York Times Book Review? There was that jab at President Bush in Dave Itzkoff's last piece on Michael Crichton…
ST: That was fun.
MO: There were two books about Israel…
ST: We do a fair amount on Israel, not as much as other parts of the paper do. We are part of the newspaper, so we like to think that we are connected to the paper, that we're covering some of the issues that you'll find from a different perspective because we have outside writers and reporters. Also, it can be more reflective because a book will be published six to nine to twelve months after the event, so while the Bush presidency is being hashed and rehashed, well, we probably won't see really consequential books on it at least until a year after he's out of office. In that way, you can bring a different type of perspective to it. Journalistically that's a role we play with the rest of the newspaper, and also in more literary/cultural terms it's just to make readers of the New York Times aware of what the important books are and why they're important. Remember, we're folded inside a big newspaper, or people go to the homepage, the webpage, and find us, so we're a small slice within the newspaper. That's a lot of what our role is: in a sense, to cover books, in addition to what the daily newspaper does; our writers have more room, somewhat more time, but that's all it is, to give a snapshot of the literary world on any given moment.
MO: Do you read any lit-blogs now?
ST: No, I don't. I don't really have time. Other people here do and they'll tell me about them. I never read blogs. I read Slate a lot, for instance, and I used to write for them. Now, I just don't really have time. What I'll do every few months is just a quick kind of speed through, but it's not really my taste. I find they write about us, but I don't find they write about authors and have that many interesting things to say about literature. Maybe I'm missing them? It seems to be more of a kind of a scorecard they keep about us and I think, well, let's say they don't like us and we're doing a terrible job. All they're doing is publicizing what we do. I don't understand that. If they think that we don't do enough fiction, well why aren't you using your blog to write about those novels and say interesting things about them? Why not just tell us about all those books? It seems very parasitical after a while and the sort of echo chamber-ish and they get so much wrong. They're so misinformed about so many things that it seems unfruitful to pay attention. They really don't get what we do, or how we do it, and they don't really want to know because if they do it would kind of undermine the attacks and all the rest. For instance, there was someone who was complaining that we weren't using David Orr more often and that it was because I had some problems with Orr. I'm the guy who gave Orr a column and the reason why he wasn't writing was because his father was seriously ill and he'd gotten some gig in Princeton. That's why you weren't seeing him more. So there's this kind of conspiratorial view they have, that I'm here deciding, "Let's destroy fiction by not reviewing it!" or, "This guy writes too well, so let's not publish him!" That's not the way journalism works.
MO: On a personal level, do you think the novel is dead or at least seriously wounded?
ST: Eh, it's been wounded forever. I was just doing a little piece myself on Saul Bellow and here he is writing about Ralph Ellison in 1952 and he talks about the novel being played out and being dead. It's been going on forever - back when Joyce and Proust were writing, the novel looked like it was dead. In some ways, it's wounded, but most art forms are. One great novelist comes along and everyone's mind gets changed. A friend in England told me that. As soon as Houellebecq came along, suddenly the novel was alive again. That feels right. It's just that there's never very many good ones [novelists] and I think the delusion or generous misconception many people have is that there are all the great novelists out there, if only the book review would cover them. We look at all the fiction when it comes in. Dwight [Garner, the senior editor] and Alida [Becker, the senior fiction editor] are doing ninety percent of it and they are extremely knowledgeable and hopeful, yet there's very little they see that seems to merit it. I think, at any given time, there are only a handful or two [novelists] who are really doing significant work, because it's a hard, hard form to work in. It's probably true that some gifted people who would once have written novels do other things now, but then there are also more people on the planet so you'd think that would balance out. I think that for the novel, this is just not its moment the way maybe it was in Dickens' or Tolstoy's time, but still there are really good novelists. I go back and reread Herzog; I'm amazed at how good it is. I showed a passage to Dwight the other day and said, "No one writes like this anymore. No one can do it, no one has that same passionate intensity about every word in a sentence." Yet there are some who do, so I don't know.
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